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Intelligence Everywhere
| Article
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10334 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1993 |
3,249 Words |
| Author
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Matthew Kohler
Matthew Kohler is pursuing a doctorate in physics at the
University of Colorado at Boulder. |
Since the discovery of the transistor in 1947, a lot of very clever people have been changing the world on a regular basis by building on that breakthrough. A key step on the road to the transistorized transformation of society came in the early 1970s when Intel introduced the first microprocessor--a computer on a chip that brought computing power to the masses. Now home computers are commonplace, and ordinary electronic gadgets like watches and telephones have embedded microprocessors.
As microprocessor chips themselves have gotten more and more powerful, engineers and scientists have realized that harnessing the full capacity of the microprocessors could be enhanced by the development of other chips designed specifically for interfacing with the microprocessors. Two of these chips are the digital signal processing (DSP) chip and the modular microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) chip [see "The DSP Decade," THE WORLD & I, August 1992, p. 240 and "Microwave Microelectronics," March 1992, p. 222]. DSP chips are an aid to bridging the gap between microprocessors and sounds of the world, including human speech. MMIC chips open a large and important part of the electromagnetic spectrum, the microwave region, to direct manipulation by integrated circuits.
Now, a new kind of microchip, the Neuron chip (developed by Echelon Corporation of Palo Alto, California) aims to be the interface through which machines of all sorts will coordinate their diverse functions. Chips have a personality quirk that limits their usefulness: They are generally lonely souls, not especially good at communicating. Sure, your computer talks to your printer, but is your telephone connected to your stereo? Can you program your stereo to lower its volume if the phone rings? Not yet, perhaps, but you may not have to wait long.
In principle, any group of electronic devices can be linked to create a multicomponent computerized gizmo [see "Moving toward the Automated Home," THE WORLD & I, November 1991, p. 304]. The tricky part is actually doing it. Connecting each device to a central computer works, but the system becomes unwieldy when there are many interdependent devices (or nodes, in the networking jargon). If money is no object, you can distribute the intelligence by putting a microprocessor in each node. This type of network offers a powerful way to control the facilities in a building or factory. But the system has to be custom designed, and in the business world "custom designed" might as well be "diamond studded." At the moment, distributed intelligence is an important but limited industry confined to users who can afford to pay $1,000 or more per node.
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